One of the most common case mods that are done are blow holes. Usually this is done by cutting a hole and slapping a fan grill on top of it. Most common grills are the ones that wire around in circles like the one seen in our blow hole guide:

These are getting a little too used by too many people so the fine folks at PCMods.com decided to change it up. We received a nice package from Nick at Crazy PC with some new items he acquired in his shop, newly styled fan grills!

Alright, you're probably thinking what the hell are wrong these people at GT. Don't they have better things to do than review simple pieces of metal? Yea, we probably do but these things look rather swank so we thought heck, why not show them off.

To start off, we had to cut up some holes to put these grills on. The ones we received are the 80mm variety. They come in other sizes including 92 and 120mm. Before we provide you with some pics of what they look like on a case, we are going to create some holes for them to sit in.

We're going to be checking out the atomic and the biohazard design today. Both machine cut and sturdy as can be. I used to be able to bend the regular wire grills a little to straighten them out when they are bent, but these are solid and rather hard to bend. No need really since these came in flat and even.

What we first did was assemble our tools. What is needed includes the following:

Drill w/ drill bits

Dremel

Pencil

Masking tape

Ruler

Our first step was to pencil in the exact area we will be drilling and cutting. The grill is a perfect template to do the work on (hard to see the pencil lines here):

Once the outline is complete, take some masking tape and go around the area we penciled in to prevent any sudden jerk scratches by the machinery when drilling or cutting.

Now to find out the exact size of the drill bits we will need. If you have bits that have size labels, you will need the 3/16 sized bit. If you don't have them labeled, you can always just take it and stick it through and test the size.

For our drilling, we will be using the DeWalt 5.4amp corded drill. This thing has silly strong power.

The bits we used are created with small pilot points. So slippage on the first strike on the surface is non-existent. You can create your own pilot point to make it easier to drill by just taking a small screw driver and pushing a small wedge in the holes. After about 1 minutes, we had our four holes done.

Our next step will be to get that pesky circle out of the way. A blow hole would be quite useless if it were there, so we switched out the drill for our Dremel Multi-Pro. About 10-15 minutes later, we had our blow hole done for our smashing new grills!

Here is our finished result. A nice clean look, goes real well if you have a silver or black case.

As you can see from that handle, this will be sitting in our LAN Box : ) Which reminds me, the second part of that should be online this week! Thanks for sitting through our shortest review yet, let us know if you like these grills. You can pick them up from Crazy PC!